1. Technical Field
The invention relates to the delivery of content across a world wide area networking in a computer environment. More particularly, the invention relates to delivering content in a secure manner and managing traffic across a world wide area network in a computer environment.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The Internet is a world wide “super-network” which connects together millions of individual computer networks and computers. The Internet is generally not a single entity. It is an extremely diffuse and complex system over where no single entity has complete authority or control. Although the Internet is widely know for one of its ways of presenting information through the World Wide Web (herein “Web”), there are many other services currently available based upon the general Internet protocols and infrastructure.
The Web is often easy to use for people inexperienced with computers. Information on the Web often is presented on “pages” of graphics and text that contain “links” to other pages either within the same set of data files (i.e., Web site) or within data files located on other computer networks. Users often access information on the Web using a “browser” program such as one made by Netscape Communications Corporation (now America Online, Inc.) of Mountain View, Calif. or Explorer™ from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash. Browser programs can process information from Web sites and display the information using graphics, text, sound, and animation. Accordingly, the Web has become a popular medium for advertising goods and services directly to consumers.
As time progressed, usage of the Internet has exploded. There are literally millions of users on the Internet. Usage of the Internet is increasing daily and will eventually be in the billions of users. As usage increases so does traffic on the Internet. Traffic generally refers to the transfer of information from a Web site at a server computer to a user at a client computer. The traffic generally travels through the world wide network of computers using a packetized communication protocol, such as TCP/IP. Tiny packets of information travel from the server computer through the network to the client computer. Like automobiles during “rush hour” on Highway 101 in Silicon Valley, the tiny packets of information traveling through the Internet become congested. Here, traffic jams which cause a delay in the information from the server to the client occur during high usage hours on the Internet. These traffic jams lead to long wait times at the client location. Here, a user of the client computer may wait for a long time for a graphical object to load onto his/her computer.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a set of technologies that the owners of intellectual property can use to protect their copyrighted material. The DRM system encrypts digital media and can limit access to users that have acquired a license. The DRM architecture is a unified approach that has a central authorization location (clearing house). Users log onto a server containing copyrighted material. The server must access the central authorization location to authenticate users before allowing access to the copyrighted material.
Real Server from RealNetworks Inc. of Seattle, Wash., is a localized streaming media system that must also access a centralized user database. A user logs onto a streaming media server which accesses a user database to authenticate the user. Once the user is authenticated, he can stream the particular media content that he selected from the streaming media server.
The drawbacks to the above approaches is that there is no possibility of load balancing across multiple streaming media servers because the security aspects of the prior art require that the user stream from the streaming media server that he was authenticated on. Also, the streaming media servers must access a central clearing house to authenticate user accesses.
It would be advantageous to provide a secure content delivery system that allows network traffic to be efficiently distributed to content servers by load balancing requests among servers and provides faster response times. It would further be advantageous to provide a secure content delivery that allows content servers to locally authenticate secure user accesses.